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  Also By Bradley Wright

  Alexander King

  THE SECRET WEAPON

  COLD WAR

  MOST WANTED

  POWER MOVE

  Alexander King Prequels

  WHISKEY & ROSES

  VANQUISH

  KING’S RANSOM

  KING’S REIGN

  SCOURGE

  Lawson Raines

  WHEN THE MAN COMES AROUND

  SHOOTING STAR

  Santa Claus

  SAINT NICK

  SAINT NICK 2

  Copyright © 2020 by Bradley Wright

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Bradley Wright/King’s Ransom Publishing

  www.bradleywrightauthor.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead,

  or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  The Secret Weapon/ Bradley Wright. -- 1st ed.

  ISBN - 978-0-9973926-7-8

  For Kade Alexander

  I’m the shelter in the storm, the anchor in the tide, and the whispering wind if ever you feel lost. My back is strong, son, come aboard until you’re ready to walk alone.

  To think of shadows is a serious thing.

  Victor Hugo

  It is madness for sheep to talk peace with a wolf.

  Thomas Fuller

  Prologue

  The Gazi neighborhood of Athens, Greece

  March 9th, 2020

  CIA Special Agent Fred Johnson was feeling good after finally having the meeting that would shake things up in the war on terror. He didn’t know it yet, but he unfortunately wouldn’t live long enough to tell anyone about it.

  The streets weaving through one of the liveliest neighborhoods in Greece were almost entirely deserted. As were most places around the world at four in the morning. It was the only time he could get the bartender to meet with him—after hours—when hopefully all the prying eyes would be asleep. After two years of undercover work in Athens, chasing his tail and reporting nothing but failure to his superiors, he finally knew not only who was running things in the fastest-growing terrorist organization in the world but also where that man was hiding.

  Fred walked past the row of some of the most happening nightclubs and bars in the city. All were closed at that hour, but when open it was a murderers’ row for places to get wasted on booze, women, or whatever else got sold in their bathrooms. Fred had spent a lot of his first year in Greece in those places. He spent the entire second year trying to avoid them. His apartment was just a street over now. Though he hadn’t had a drink in months, tonight called for a celebration. Not only would he save countless lives with the information he’d just bought from a man connected to the terrorist cell, but the last two pages of important notes he’d just written in his notebook would propel his career immeasurably forward. Plus, if everything played out right, he could also finally get home to his daughter in South Carolina. A day he’d been praying far too long for. Now it was within reach.

  As he crossed the street, he heard a woman’s laughter echo behind him. Someone kicked a glass bottle in the distance, and it clinked and clanked across the pavement. A block away a dog was barking. Otherwise, it was as quiet in his neighborhood as he had ever heard it. And maybe twice as dark. He couldn’t remember the last time he was out at night and the neon lights from the bars weren’t guiding him home. Now there was just the one streetlight a couple hundred feet away and a few lamps in windows belonging to fellow members of the insomniacs society he’d unwittingly joined about six months ago.

  The stress of the agency breathing down his neck for answers as the attacks mounted around the globe had stolen his ability to sleep almost entirely. However, he couldn’t help but think that tonight, after a glass of wine or two, he might just sleep like a baby.

  Fred crossed the last street to his apartment complex. The thought of maybe being able to leave that place for home, and to be with his daughter, gave him a little extra bounce in his step. He would certainly miss the gyros and the Greek goddesses that seemed to be everywhere, but he wouldn’t miss Athens as a whole.

  He started up the outside stairwell that led to his place on the fourth floor. Just as he was making the turn for the second floor, some movement caught his eye below him. He slowed his pace, and instead of living in the future with his thoughts, he keened his senses back to the present. He stopped, listened intently, but didn’t hear anything below him. That area of Athens could get a little rough after hours, but he hadn’t run into much more than a drunken partyer or a beggar in all the time he’d lived there.

  Fred continued up the stairs, conscious of his surroundings but not really worried. He turned the corner to the stairs bringing him to the fourth floor. All seemed quiet, so he pulled out his keys and walked to his door. Just before he inserted the key, something told him to walk around the wall and check the outer walkway. He poked his head around the corner. Nothing. He shrugged and walked back to his door.

  Once inside the apartment, before he even took off his shoes, he did what he always did when he came back from speaking with an informant or, for that matter, any meeting regarding his business with the CIA: he walked over to the painting hanging above his mantle in the living room, pulled it off away from the wall, lifted the piece of tape that held the paper backing down at the corner, and placed his notebook full of secrets in the hole there. He replaced the tape and moved the painting back, flush against the wall.

  His next move was toward the kitchen. He had a bottle of red that he’d been saving for a special occasion. He couldn’t think of a better one than tonight. Fred found the bottle in the cabinet, grabbed the wine opener and a glass. When the cork popped, the sweet aroma of black cherries, chocolate, and hint of oak emanated from the bottle. He laughed at himself for knowing and recognizing such things. Before swearing off booze for a while, he’d become quite proficient with tasting wines and discerning their aromatic notes. The life of a lone spy is a lot more mundane than most would expect.

  Fred tipped the bottle and watched the dark red liquid slosh into his glass. He set the bottle down, picked up the glass, and gave it an aerating swirl. With his free hand, he took out his phone. He wasn’t supposed to check in with his superior for another couple of days, but he just couldn’t wait to share the groundbreaking news.

  Just as Fred was about to tap on Deputy Director Rodgers’s contact, there was a knock at his door. It caught him so off guard that he dropped his phone, but he managed to keep his glass in hand. He set down the wine and pulled his Beretta from his hip holster. There was no reason anyone should be knocking on his door, at any time, much less at four in the morning. His heart rate ticked up as he looked through the peephole.

  It was a woman.

  Her hair was a mess, her mascara was running down her face, and she looked terrified. It must have been her whom he saw when he was coming up the stairs. He hoped she was okay. He holstered his gun and took a deep breath to calm his jangled nerves.

  Fred swung the door open. “Are you all
right?”

  At first he thought the man who came around the corner with a gun in his hand was going to shoot the woman. But as Fred struggled for his own gun at his hip, he noticed a smile across the woman’s face. Then the man’s gun went directly to his own head.

  “Do I get my money now? I fooled him, just like you asked,” the woman said to the gunman.

  Three more men came around the corner. The gunman shoved Fred back inside his apartment and took his gun. He knew what they were there for. He knew he was going to die. Fred just didn’t want to be tortured.

  “I already called my superior,” Fred told the gunman, who was large, olive skinned, black cornrows in his hair, “and told him everything I know. Everything your man at the bar spilled to me. I know who your leader is . . . and where he lives. You’re too late.”

  “In that case,” the man said, looking around the room, “you’re going to give me all of your credentials and your protocols for checking in. Or I’ll not only kill you but your entire family.”

  Fred knew then that he wasn’t going to get his wish. These men were going to torture him. He just hoped they wouldn’t find out he had a daughter.

  Hours later, after he’d bled all that he could bleed and the gun was to his head one final time, the last thing he thought of was the notebook. He hoped that whoever the CIA sent to investigate his death would be the one to find the notebook instead of these terrorist thugs.

  But that was information Fred would never have the privilege of knowing.

  Chapter One

  6 days later

  South of London, UK

  Alexander King took a moment to steady his breathing. He’d waited a long time to kill the man who was less than a mile away from him now, but he couldn’t let the anticipation affect his performance. Tonight, like every other night in his line of work, there was no room for error.

  He slowed the rental car as he made a right turn off the A21 motorway onto Bewlbridge Lane. The hour long drive from London had been quiet. By eight o’clock in the evening most had settled in after a long day of work. However, King’s workday had only just begun. He glanced up through the windshield at the colorful sky—an orange glow across the entire expanse hovering below a fiery layer of red. Those colors were the daylight fading, and long shadows began to throw their cast. Which was perfect, because for the last year those shadows were where he’d done nearly all of his work.

  Though his flat was in the Soho neighborhood of central London, King had no need for a map to get where he was going. This was the thirty-third day in a row he’d made this particular drive. Long enough to watch hints of spring begin to blossom in the countryside southeast of the city. Every time he traveled this far into the country, a longing for where he grew up tugged at him. As he took in the rolling hills that reminded him of Lexington, he would have to blink away the running Thoroughbreds he knew weren’t actually there. Kentucky—once a place he could always come back to after the wars he’d fought for his country—now seemed a place that only existed in his dreams.

  King turned left and steered the car toward a small boat dock that served as an entryway into the Bewl Water reservoir. In all of his previous thirty-two trips, this was only the second time he’d made it to the docks. When you are someone who never wants to be noticed, you never keep the same pattern. Even when you know no one is watching. It was the same reason the car he’d driven tonight was also the thirty-third different vehicle or mode of transportation he’d taken to get there.

  One can never be too careful.

  King turned left off the main road and slowed to a stop. The small parking lot’s streetlamps popped on overhead as he exited the vehicle. Cool air rushed him, carrying with it first the scent of mildewed wood, finishing with the sweet smell of English bluebells that carpeted the nearby fields. He could hear the boats rocking a few feet away, but nothing else.

  More importantly, he could hear no one else.

  He glanced down at his watch. Just about twenty minutes now.

  He stepped from the pavement onto the wooden dock, counted four boats down on his left, and stopped when he came to the small green fishing boat. It had a large blue tackle box in the front, just like Sam had told him it would. Not that he’d doubted her. She was almost never wrong.

  King stepped down into the boat, and it wobbled beneath him. His six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-fifteen-pound frame sank the bottom a few inches. Though it had been almost five years since his last mission with the Navy SEALs, he’d never stopped the daily workouts that had become second nature. He was all muscle, but it was lean muscle. He was strong as a bull, just not so much that it took away from his agility. The things he did for a living required a lot of stealth, and a squad leader once told him, “A bull of a man never snuck up on anyone.” The last few years of vigilante work and subsequent missions with the CIA had taught him as much to be true.

  He untied the damp rope from the metal cleat attached to the dock and pushed back. As soon as he cleared the boats on both sides of him, he reached back and yanked the starter on the outboard motor, then grabbed the steering handle. The small engine barely roared to life, but the power of the boat was not his concern. He turned right once he cleared the dock and started down the lake. He didn’t have far to go, but because he was anxious to get his hands on his target, the short ride seemed to take forever.

  The light above him had been swallowed by the night, the glow of the rising moon behind him now his only guide. He took out the small set of keys left for him at a drop back in London, then scooted forward on the bench seat and opened the large tackle box. He raised the top shelf, reached in, and wrapped his fingers around the Glock 19 handgun waiting for him. It had been fitted with a suppressor can. A gift from the clandestine gods. Sam had also left him a Chris Reeve Sebenza 21 frame lock knife. Just in case a gun didn’t make sense. That went in the pocket of his black tactical pants—the kind that looked civilian without losing efficiency. The last of the treats in the bottom of the box was a burner phone. He picked it up and dialed the number he’d memorized earlier.

  “I see there were no problems with the drop,” Sam answered, her British accent thick. He hadn’t realized he was so on edge until he heard the sound of her voice, then felt the tension fall from his shoulders.

  “Everything else in line?”

  Normally he would have had a sarcastic line ready to throw at her, maybe something to rib her about a past failure. But not tonight.

  “All I know is that no one has come or gone from the estate in the last twenty-four hours. The rest is up to you,” she said.

  “I’ll check in when it’s over.”

  King went to close the flip phone when he heard her voice.

  “Listen, X,” Sam said. X was the moniker Sam had chosen for him when she could no longer say his name in open communication. “I realize this is old hat for you. But this is the first of your targets in a long time that is personal. Just make sure you—”

  “Sam,” he interrupted. He could see his jumping-off point just up ahead. “I kill people who threaten my country’s way of life . . . they’re all personal.”

  He shut the phone and shoved it back into his pocket. He felt down beside his right foot, along the inside wall of the boat. His hand found the wooden handle of a single paddle. He pulled the oar into his lap and reached back to shut down the motor. The boat coasted forward, and he laid the paddle in the water at an angle that would steer him toward the shore.

  Though he didn’t want to think about it, he knew Sam was right. This one was more personal. This wasn’t an assignment handed down from CIA Director Mary Hartsfield, the only other person on the planet who knew he was alive. This was something he and Sam had never stopped working on by themselves since the day King was forced to disappear in order to keep everyone he loved safe. He couldn’t think about how close they all were to dying last year, and he couldn’t focus on the fact that the man in the house just down the lake was one of the last people livin
g who was responsible for putting everyone he loved in danger. To Sam’s point, it needed to be about the kill. Not about whom he was killing.

  The nose of the boat slid to a stop on a flat part of the bank. There was a thick wall of trees between him and the house he’d been watching for more than a month. Being so close spiked his heart rate. He let the sick feeling of unused adrenaline wash through his system as he stepped out of the boat and took a deep breath.

  Though King never enjoyed taking another human’s life, he’d be lying to himself if he said he wasn’t looking forward to finally ending the man responsible for the death of so many innocent people. The man responsible for putting King’s own loved ones in danger.

  Andonios Maragos was a terrorist on the wanted list of every government agency in the world. Last year his money had funded the most terrifying attack on the White House in US history. King knew there were other people closer to the terrorist group, which Maragos was involved with, who were actually pulling the strings, but he didn’t know who they were yet, and he had to start somewhere. The money was as good a place as any. And because bureaucracy had failed to pin this guilty man to any of his crimes, it was up to King to make him pay.

  King wasn’t sure if killing a monster like Maragos was playing God or playing the devil, but he also didn’t care. Either way, the man was going to get what was coming to him.

  And there was no one better suited for the work of giving Maragos what he deserved than Alexander King.

  As he stepped into the shadows of the trees, King had never been more ready to do his job.

  Chapter Two